Sermon - Rev. Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor

0:00 Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Be the change you seek in the world. Love one another. Love your neighbor as yourself. Leave room for holy envy. Bromides or lifesavers? The fourth one might be less familiar to you than the other three. It comes from Krister Stendahl, Swedish bishop and biblical scholar who proposed three rules for religious understanding between new neighbors of different faiths. The year was 1985. The Church of Sweden was a state church, Lutheran, since the Reformation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was opening a new temple in Stockholm. And there was more than a little anxiety about the newcomers from Utah, law, which was how Bishop Stendhal found himself in front of a microphone addressing a press conference. If anyone expected him to exercise his office by defending the traditional faith of the nation, they were surprised because what he did instead was offer a brief ethic for engaging religious strangers, whether they were fresh from the other side of the world or had been living for generations on the other side of town.

1:26 First he said when you're trying to understand another religion, you should ask its adherents and not its enemies. Second, don't compare your best to their worst. And third, leave room for holy envy. He didn't say much about what he meant by that last one, but as soon as I heard the two words together drew me in, an oxymoron as intriguing as divine decadence or good grief. How could one of the seven deadly sins be holy? What might make it so? And why was it vital for religious understanding? The best way to test it out, I thought, was to introduce the concept to my students in world religion classes at Piedmont College in rural northeast Georgia. Though they came from many parts of the U.S. and from some other parts of the world as well, most at that time identified as Christian.

2:26 Whether they were at Piedmont by choice or by parental fiat, they still lived in what Flannery O'Connor once called the Christ-Haunted South. The county surrounding the college, the county where I still live, has one bowling alley, one movie theater, three rivers, and 62 churches. It's not Minneapolis. Still, there were plenty of students using their distance from home to get some distance on their home religion as well, confident that they had a lock on the basic tenets of Christian faith—one God, one Son, one way, one truth, one life. This may help explain why Religion 101, Religions of the World, was always fully booked. For twenty years, every semester, always full, sometimes with a waiting list, because students had questions about religion they didn't believe they could ask at home or at church, or because they weren't satisfied with the answers they had gotten there—both about their own faith and about the faith of others.

3:39 But once word got out that you could not pass Dr. Taylor's class unless you worshipped false idols— and that there were free meals after the field trips to masjids, temples, monasteries, and synagogues, students didn't even ask to see the syllabus first. They were in. What I knew, and they didn't, was that they were in for more than a scenic tour of the world's great religious traditions, which was, after all, what the textbook promised them. colorful maps, concise timelines, photos worthy of National Geographic, and essential vocabulary words for each of the five religions that we would study over the next 15 weeks. But there was nothing to smell in that book. There was nothing to eat in it. There was no music. There was no silence. There was no body heat. That's why field trips became so vital to the class, because they gave students a chance to get off the bus and meet people who complicated things for them—kind and funny and generous people who didn't match their stereotypes of Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or Jews, people who said inspiring things and who forgot to turn their cell phones off and who poured tea and who said, What a great questioner.

5:11 Please come back any time. Bring your friends. Once that happened, there was no going back. Students would never again believe everything they thought or everything they had been taught about people of other faiths. When they got back on the bus, their certainty had great big cracks in it, which is, after all, what the best kind of education is designed to do—to shake the foundations. which is after all. to shake the ground so hard that the brittle things break and the flimsy things fall, clearing space for stronger, truer things to be built in their places. It could have happened in the classroom, I suppose. I could have invited practitioners of different faiths to come visit us. Instead of going to see them, it would have been a lot cheaper and easier.

6:08 I wouldn't have had to crawl down the aisle of a dark bus after all the students had gotten off to pick up their forgotten water bottles and candy wrappers. I wouldn't have had to take home all the fragrant Indian food they left on the bus because it wasn't chicken. But if I had invited visitors to class instead of going to see them, the burden would have been on them. To find the college and locate the classroom, to enter it to 25 pairs of staring eyes, to endure my introduction, to say something funny to put everyone at ease, and then to spend the next 60 minutes summing up the entire beauty and meaning of their faith as its sole representative before the students started filling their backpacks and the bell rang.

7:04 I tried that a couple of times, but you know what? I got jealous of the vulnerability of my guests. Watching them rise to the challenge of being perfect strangers, I decided that my students and I ought to be doing that instead. We should be leaving our comfort zones to go meet other people and theirs. We should be entering their sacred spaces without knowing the rules, without even knowing whether we had dressed right or where to put our shoes. To offer hospitality, that's one thing and a good thing, but it puts you in charge. Receiving it is something else altogether, especially when you and your religion are used to being in charge. Being a guest can transform you like being a host never can. It levels the playing field. It puts you in receiving mode, which has a lot less ego in it than giving mode. It also accelerates the learning curve as you find yourself in the minority for once, seeing the world through other people's lenses instead of expecting them to use yours.

8:19 One of the biggest surprises for students who got off the bus was that no one tried to convert them. Since they expected others to do to them what they had done to others, The Christians, at least, were prepared to resist the evangelization they were sure was coming. As often as I assured them that visiting a Buddhist monastery would not make them Buddhist any more than visiting France would make them French, they made sure I knew what they would and would not do. They would not bow when the teacher came into the room. They would keep their eyes open while everyone else closed theirs, and they would trust Jesus to know they were there for extra credit and not for enlightenment. One of my favorite students was, still is, named Brian. He was an Episcopalian, so he was up for enlightenment.

9:23 But he still had no idea what to expect, and so of course he was uncomfortable. On the Tuesday evening that we attended a public lecture at Drepung Losaling Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Atlanta, Brian decided he wanted to try sitting on a Zafu for the entire hour instead of on a folding chair with people my age. So while the other students found their zones of safety, Brian chose plump black cushion in the third row on the right while I settled into a folding chair a couple of rows behind him. We did stand with everyone else when the teacher came in the room, and then we sat back down as he fiddled with the lapel mic on his crimson robe. He was a Tibetan monk who looked every bit the part, sitting cross-legged at a low teaching table in front of an altar populated by a great many Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Gurus, and Rinpoches.

10:19 First, he led the regular crowd on that Tuesday night in a chant that they all knew by heart. Then he invited us to spend five minutes in silent meditation before he began his talk, which was titled Cultivating Happiness. I tried not to look around the Dharma Hall to see how the other students were doing, but Brian was right in front of me, so it was impossible to miss how much effort he he was putting in to sitting straight and holding still without falling asleep because college students are always tired and college teachers are too. So I closed my eyes until the teacher cleared his throat to let us know the quiet time was up. He had to clear his throat a couple of times before he could get a full sentence out without croaking. I don't know whether it was the pollen or all that chanting.

11:14 Then he had to move his microphone around a little bit when some people in the back of the room kept saying, can't hear, can't hear. Then after taking a sip of hot tea someone had placed in front of him, he finally got down to business. Had we ever noticed, he said, how our unhappiness with not being in a relationship quickly turned into our unhappiness with the relationship we had just entered. Had we ever noticed how soon our unhappiness with not having a job turned into our unhappiness with the job we'd just found? In no more than four sentences, he'd made his point, our happiness is not dependent on our circumstances, which are always changing. Tapping his temple with the fingers of his right hand, he told us that our unhappiness is a product of our own minds as we persist in locating the problem out there instead of in here.

12:13 While we spin our wheels trying to control things beyond our control, we ignore the one thing within our power to change, which is the way we see things and the compassion we're able to offer. When the monk took another sip of tea, Brian craned his head around so I could see his face, eyes wide, eyebrows up, mouthing his words really big so I would understand. And what he said is, this is just about life. making his eyes wider and wiggling his eyebrows a few times. This is just about life. At the end of the hour, the teacher wrapped up his talk with another brief period of meditation, and later, when I read Brian's field trip report, I learned more about his experience on the Zafu, including what happened during the last meditation period.

13:09 He said it was his first attempt at meditation, So he could hardly believe it when he felt a deep warmth coming up his left leg straight toward his heart. First time, 10 minutes in, and he was being given a taste of enlightenment. Then he opened his eyes and saw the person next to him had spilled her coffee. which was wicking up the left leg of his jeans. So I saved his report, along with one written by a young man who had been much more concerned about going to the monastery. Here's what he wrote afterwards. There may have been some rituals and ceremonies that I was not sure I wanted to take part in, But when we arrived, it was different.

14:06 To his surprise, he said, he was able to clear his mind during the meditation periods, reaching a place of calm that he had never reached before. He said, the whole experience made me think about changing my perspective on what's going on in my life. Not about changing my religion, but about changing the way I look at things. This may be what we've been learning in class about different worldviews. But I did not understand the concept until I saw it firsthand at the monastery. There's that crack again. Learning the word worldview is troubling enough if you never knew you had one. But once you visit another one, it's hard to deny that there are plural ways of seeing and being in the world which don't match up nearly as neatly as you might have hoped.

15:06 All religions are not alike. There are as many irreconcilable differences between them as there are within them. Remember the Lutherans and the Mormons? And still, I believe there is so much to be learned, to be gained by visiting the religious neighbors, even if you are a perfect stranger. because how else could you have seen your own faith more clearly without seeing it alongside theirs, the best of theirs, laid alongside the best of yours, without any illusions about the worst you're both capable of doing in the name of your religion.

15:49 As you may imagine, it was often difficult for Christian students to see something lovely in another faith. The divine singular was so much a part of their religion—one God, one Son, one way, one truth, one life— that to find beauty in another way felt like treason to them. When they experienced a new calm at a Buddhist monastery or sensed the deep reverence in a Muslim's five-times daily prayer, it felt like telling Jesus they were seeing someone else. When they loved the drumming at the Krishna temple or the sweet piece of the Shabbat service at the synagogue, it made them worry that they had lost their faith. One of the things that always slapped my heart the hardest was hearing from those who had called home all excited to tell their parents what they were learning in class, only to receive a warning about falling for all that stuff or opening their minds so far that their brains fell out. I think that's why they took to the concept of holy envy so gratefully, not because they knew or cared who Krister Stendahl was or why he put those two words together in the first place, but because they had already experienced the envy and they were relieved to think there might be something holy about it. With just a little help, they began to see how admiring the high school football players in Michigan who kept training for their championship game while fasting during the month of Ramadan, that might inspire them in their own faiths to greater spiritual courage. After a few of them kept a modified kosher diet for a class project, They wrote about how hard it was to find anything to eat in the class cafeteria, and how much new regard they had for Jews who thought of God before every bite they took.

17:55 One student wrote, one guile-less student wrote, I honestly was not expecting to learn anything from this assignment. I just thought it looked easy. Who knew, she finished, that food could teach you life lessons? Even students who identified as atheist, humanist, or undecided warmed to the idea of holy envy, which they adapted to meet them where they were. One student wrote on his final exam after I incorporated a question on holy envy, he said, by holy envy in a lot of ways. For instance, I love the Hindu notion that karma is not measured or judged by a higher power. You are responsible for your own actions. Whether I decide to believe in a religion or not, I will keep this moral code of self-accountability with me. And another said this, when it When it comes to holy envy, one thing that really sticks out in my mind is when we went to the mosque on our field trip and the imam spoke to us ahead of time.

19:08 What he told us is my holy envy. He told us how he doesn't wish to convert us to Islam. He just wants us to be the best Jews, the best Christians, the best people we can be regardless of religion. This was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard, and it is my holy envy because I wish Christianity was this way. As it turned out, what we had most in common was not our religion but our humanity, embodied in such astonishingly diverse ways that it began to seem this might be the will of the Creator and not a deviation from it. whose gift to each other is not our sameness but our difference, our ability to shake each other's foundations so that the cracks in our separate certainties open up and, when we reach out to steady ourselves, find human hands as warm and as woundable as our own.

20:23 For Christians in particular, this is a basic tenet of the faith—to see God's image in those who are not made in our image, to seek and serve Christ in all persons loving our neighbors as ourselves. Is it working yet? Oh, don't ask me that. It's the wrong question. Are we cracked open yet? Better question. I'm cracked. Best question of all, why have faith at all? Is it to make sure you get to heaven? Is it to rest in the confidence that you have a lock on God? Or is it to discover how many faces the divine has and to practice giving yourself away every day to some perfect stranger as you learn how to be a better one yourself? You will be the judge of that.

21:24 But whatever you decide, thank you for being here today, for opening your minds so wide that your hearts fall out, and to this church and this city for inspiring deep and abiding holy envy in me. Thank you very much.